December 2010

December 21, 2010

Nearly 14 years after that match-up, another man-vs.-machine competition is being staged, and this one will be hosted on the long-running American television game show "Jeopardy!" In a series of shows that will air Feb. 14-16, two of Jeopardy!'s most successful players will test their knowledge against a cluster of IBM Power 750 machines running IBM DeepQA software, dubbed "Watson."

A group of us recently met with IBM's marketing team to get more information about Watson and to discuss the technology behind it. They were quick to praise the efforts of the scientists at IBM Research, under the direction of Dave Ferrucci, as being the brains behind Watson.

They wouldn't confirm the number of machines that make up the cluster (saying only it was between one and 100 servers), but they told us that Watson runs IBM DeepQA software on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 that has been compiled for Power. The Power 750 servers, which have been configured with 32 cores and either 256 GB or 128 GB memory each, are connected together over a 10 Gb Ethernet network. Watson connects with 2 TB of clustered storage for a total of 4 TB.

I'm interested in solid-state disks, so I had to ask if Watson used SSD to speed up access to the data. I was told that it uses SAS drives and that disk performance isn't an issue since, once booted, the entire application and data resides in main memory. Watson receives questions in text form at the same time that human contestants have the questions read to them. Watson physically presses the buzzer and uses a voice synthesizer to "speak" the answers. The machine isn't connected to the Internet; it relies only on its memory for answers.

"An IBM executive had proposed that Watson compete on 'Jeopardy!', but the suggestion was initially dismissed. While search engines such as Microsoft's Bing and Google are able to provide search results based on search terms provided, no computer program had been able to answer anything other than the most straightforward of questions, such as 'What is the capital of Russia?' In competitions run by the United States government, Watson's predecessors were able to answer no more than 70 percent of questions correctly and often took several minutes to come up with an answer. To compete successfully on 'Jeopardy!', Watson would need to come up with answers in no more than a few seconds, and the problems posed by the challenge of competing on the game show were initially deemed to be impossible to develop.

"In initial tests run in 2006 by David Ferrucci, the senior manager of IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration department, Watson was given 500 clues from past 'Jeopardy!' programs. While the top real-life competitors buzzed in half the time and answered as much as 95 percent of questions correctly, Watson's first pass could only get about 15 percent right. In 2007, the IBM team was given three to five years and a staff of 15 people to develop a solution to the problems posed. ...

"By 2008, the developers had advanced to the point where Watson could compete with low-level 'Jeopardy!' champions. That year, IBM contacted 'Jeopardy!' executive producer Harry Friedman about the possibility of having Watson compete as a contestant on the show. The show's producers readily agreed. ..."

In addition, another American TV show, the acclaimed science series "NOVA," will feature Watson in a Feb. 9 broadcast. The segment is entitled "The Smartest Machine on Earth."

"We were mainly interested in using 'Jeopardy!' as a playing field upon which we could do some science. We wanted the ability to use questions that had not been designed for a computer to answer. 'Jeopardy!' really represents natural language. You have to understand the English language and all the nuances and all the regionalisms, slang, and the shorthand to play the game, to get the clues. It's not just a piece of information.

"In 2009 the producers of 'Jeopardy!' watched Watson compete for the first time. Their concern was how do we keep it from becoming a stunt or a gimmick. This was different, this was the notion of knowledge acquired by a computer against knowledge acquired and displayed by the best Jeopardy! players. This could be something important, and we want to be a part of it. Many people are going to watch the 'Jeopardy!' show and look at Watson and how it competes in 'Jeopardy!' and the curiosity of the computer. They will focus on man versus machine, but the more interesting general challenge is, we are trying to produce a deep question and answering machine which will change the way people interact with computers and machines. We are going to revolutionize many many fields."

What do you think? Is this a gimmick? A ploy? Does a cluster of 750s beating humans at "Jeopardy!" make you more likely to purchase a Power Systems server? Does this mean we'll soon be able to interact with computers the way they did on Star Trek? Hopefully there will still be a way to connect my Model M keyboard to these computers of the future.

"I do believe that there is room for a VIOS, but not in each and every data center and especially not because the admin from across the street just put one on line so we have to have it too! If you were an owner of a big and heavy track capable of heavy loads in access of 100 tons, would you use it to carry a pillow across your state? You could have used a mail service instead, right? Or if you had 10,000 of pillows to transport, you will make sure they are all compressed to fit as many as possible? The point I am making here is this you would think how to save."

I remember watching a television show where it was argued that a diesel engine powered school bus that gets six miles to the gallon can sometimes be preferable to an economy car getting 40 miles to the gallon. You may be getting great mileage taking the children to and from school, but it takes a lot of small cars to transport as many children as the big bus can move in one trip. As Mark says, if you have to transport goods, look for the most economical way to do it. The same mindset applies to computing. Don't virtualize just because everyone else is, do it to save on floor space and power and cooling costs, and to consolidate workloads.

Again from Mark:

"Do I think that virtualization is a bad idea? Nope again, except that it is still a very expensive proposition. First, before even thinking about virtualization the surrounding IT environment must be comfortable with SAN boot, because without it will be very difficult if not impossible to fully utilize the processing capacity of hardware one wants to virtualize. Why? How much will it cost you to buy just one CPU (including its activation costs) + RAM + physical I/O adapters for your planned VIO environment? Now, multiply this number by two if you want to have two VIO servers in the new managed system? The point to remember is this: For VIO to save you money you have to prove that over time you will at least be able to recover the costs associated with VIO implementation. It is already obvious that if you decided to follow the VIO crowd, in order to recover the costs of virtualization, you have to pack into your managed system as many partitions as possible. Welcome to the world of SAN boot! If your partitions cannot boot from SAN you have to provide them with local disks!"

I cannot agree more. We don't want to use physical disks and physical adapters when we virtualize. We want to boot from SAN and run many LPARs on our frames, and then we can move workloads around by running Live Partition Mobility between our frames.

Mark also touches on workload partitions (WPARs) as well as Nigel Griffiths' idea about running workloads and applications inside of WPARs rather than the global AIX instance:

"Use GLOBAL [instances] solely for systems management. Don't run workloads there, and don't create any more users than are required. Create WPARs for each workload, and create the necessary users there. Since WPARs are inherently resource efficient, you don't give up very much by dedicating GLOBAL [instances] to management only. The overhead is certainly much less than creating a separate LPAR for each workload."

As I've said: Not everyone is virtualizing, and not everyone necessarily wants to virtualize. So what are your reasons for holding back?

However, I'm far less passionate about my computer mice. I seem to cycle through different iterations without much fanfare or fuss. I certainly don't miss the old style mouse with the ball inside; I was perfectly happy to join the ranks of the optical mouse users.

Recently, I got a free optical mouse. Well, it turned out it was only "almost" free, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I picked it up at a conference. Anyone who travels to these technical events knows all about the nice freebies that vendors hand out. Over the years I've taken home flying disks, foam footballs, Rubik's Cubes, flashlights, pens and flash drives, along with plenty of other knickknacks I've long since lost or given away.

Anyway, this optical mouse was actually nice. Being just the right size for my tastes, I determined it would make a fine addition to my computer bag. I'm always swapping out the mouse that I take with me when I travel. Lately I've divided my time between a corded optical mouse and a wireless optical mouse, but since this freebie mouse came with a nice retractable USB cable, I thought I'd try it on my next trip.

So I plug it in, and I'm pleased. Really, it exceeded expectations. The sensitivity was great, it seemed very responsive and, like I said, the size was just right.

But that blinking.

The mouse blinked, and it wouldn't stop. It even changed colors as it blinked.

Someone must have thought that a computer mouse that could cycle from blue to red and alternate between solid and blinking was a neat idea--and it was, for about three seconds. Then it became annoying, especially in any room with low light. If there was a simple way to stop the blinking, I couldn't figure it out. But that blinking had to be stopped.

I figured I could just open up the mouse and ... do something. I wasn't sure what, though. So I asked around. I was told that applying black nail polish to the LED would keep the annoying light from escaping. Someone else told me that a piece of black electrical tape would do the trick.

Finally, someone told me to just get some wire cutters and remove the LED entirely. That seemed more my style.

Opening the mouse was fairly simple, especially since I wasn't overly concerned with breaking my little freebie. So I went to work with the wire cutters and removed the LED.

"Able to work on almost any surface, the mouse has a small, red light-emitting diode (LED) that bounces light off that surface onto a complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. The CMOS sensor sends each image to a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis. The DSP, operating at 18 MIPS (million instructions per second), is able to detect patterns in the images and see how those patterns have moved since the previous image. Based on the change in patterns over a sequence of images, the DSP determines how far the mouse has moved and sends the corresponding coordinates to the computer. The computer moves the cursor on the screen based on the coordinates received from the mouse. This happens hundreds of times each second, making the cursor appear to move very smoothly."

Turns out my little freebie had two LEDs: One made all those annoying lights blink; the other performed the critical task of making the optical mouse itself work. In my haste to solve the problem, I'd removed both LEDs. I'd killed my mouse.

Needless to say, I realized my mistake the moment I reassembled it. So I was off to the Radio Shack to drop $1.50 on a new LED that I could solder onto the circuit board. It works fine now, and that's how I ended up with my free optical mouse that I only paid a little bit for.

I spend my work week expertly configuring, installing and supporting computers that can be worth millions, and yet I can't be trusted with a device that some vendor paid maybe a couple of bucks to put their logo on. Go figure.

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